


Five Things John Watson Will Never Tell Anyone

by Raina_at



Series: Five Things [1]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: M/M, five things
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-27
Updated: 2018-09-27
Packaged: 2019-07-18 08:01:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,844
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16114220
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Raina_at/pseuds/Raina_at
Summary: Five things John Watson will never tell anyone.





	Five Things John Watson Will Never Tell Anyone

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this in 2010, after S1. It was my first Sherlock fic.  
> Thank you, Goodbyemyfancy, for the beta eight years ago.
> 
> Also, btw, I've started writing again and I currently have neither a beta nor a Britpicker, so if anyone has time and inclination to beta some Sherlock for me, let me know, I'd be super grateful :-)

I

When John gets off the plane in London, he waits for the feeling of ‘home’ to settle in. He waits for the UK damp and the grey buildings and the bland four walls of his small room to shift into the comfortingly familiar after the alien glare of the Afghanistan sun. 

But all that happens is that he asks himself whether London was always this dull, this damp, this empty, if food was always this bland, if life was always this meaningless before, and he simply never noticed because he was used to it.

He walks – or rather limps – through the city, relearning its patterns, its speed, its scent and taste, but it all seems to float by him, to drift, nothing penetrates the dull bubble of meaningless air around him.

He tries to find something to do. He reads up on medical discoveries he’s missed on the front lines. He interviews for a few jobs. But the tremor in his left hand means he can’t operate, probably never again. 

They always knew the leg was psychosomatic. It doesn’t need a genius to deduce that a shoulder wound won’t lead to a weak leg. But at first they thought the tremor in his hand was nerve damage. But after about a hundred tests, they connected it to his PTSD, told him to get some therapy, and to have a nice life.

There are days John wishes it was nerve damage.

Because, let’s face it, for somebody like him, therapy is a complete waste of time. 

His therapist is a nice enough woman, but her failure to crack open John’s British reticence and military hatred of expressing emotion is so complete that most of the time they stare at each other in vaguely hostile silence. She tries to get him to talk about his family, his war experience. He won’t even tell her what he had for breakfast. 

To get her to leave him alone, he starts a blog he never writes in. He walks around the city like a ghost.

His therapist prescribes antidepressants. They help him sleep, at least. 

Otherwise, therapy does nothing for his limp, for his shaking hand, for his occasional urge to throw himself in front of the incoming tube. He supposes it’s as much his fault as hers.  
He tries to talk, one day. He opens his mouth to tell her something meaningful, something important, something that will help him and not give away something about himself he’d rather not have her know. 

He can think of nothing.

He shuts his mouth and spends the rest of the hour staring out of the window.

*-*

He doesn’t even know how it happens. He’s usually so careful, especially now that he can’t walk very fast. But this time, he just steps into the street and doesn’t look for cars.

The lorry is big and fast and the passer-by who grabs him and pulls him back before he gets hit by six solid tons of moving metal is the only thing that saves him from becoming road kill.

His rescuer screams at him, calls him all sorts of names. An old lady asks if he’s all right.

His heart’s beating overtime, and he’s breathing rapidly. His hands are completely steady. Everything around him is vivid, smell and sound and suddenly he _loves_ this city intensely.

He catches his own reflection in a shop window. It’s an unfamiliar sight. He’s smiling.

*-*

That night, he takes the tube out to Islington and wades through boxes and boxes full of stuff in his storage unit until he finds his dad’s old six-shooter.

He takes it home, together with a case of bullets.

It’s the middle of the night when he comes back to his room. He meets nobody, meaning the few of his neighbours who actually occasionally check that he’s still alive are all asleep. Nobody around to stop him, then. He half wishes there was. 

Methodically, trying hard not to think about what he’s doing, he loads one bullet into the gun, then spins the chamber and lets it slide back.

He puts the gun down in front of him. 

John’s never had a death wish. He never actively tried to end his own life. He isn’t trying now, not really. But he’s tantalizingly close to finally figuring out what the fuck is wrong with him, and he can’t stop himself.

A small part of him, the part that wants a job and a life and to be _normal_ again yells that this is insane. But he just… he has to _know_.

He takes the gun and with one smooth movement brings it to his temple. His hands aren’t shaking at all. 

He pulls the trigger.

There’s the click of the hammer hitting an empty chamber.

His heart pounds, and his breath comes short, and he’s flooded with an intense, almost painful kind of _joy_ to be alive, to be breathing, for every beat of his heart.

That’s the moment he realizes he’s way more screwed up than he thought he was. 

He isn’t depressed. He’s _bored_.

An hour later he’s standing on Waterloo Bridge and throwing the gun and the bullets into the Thames.

He goes to therapy next morning and when his therapist asks how he is, he just says, “Fine.”

It’s instantly clear to him that he will never, ever, talk about this. 

II

If he’s entirely honest, John has no idea why Sherlock likes having him around. That he does is obvious, he doesn’t just pull John with him on cases because he moves so fast that John is drawn along, caught in some kind of gravitational pull. Even though sometimes it seems that way.

No, Sherlock asks him to come. Sherlock wants him there with him. 

And apparently, he’s the _only one_ Sherlock has ever wanted there with him.

John doesn’t know why. Maybe it’s the life-saving. Maybe it’s the army background. Maybe it’s the fact that John doesn’t feel threatened by Sherlock’s intellect but admires it. Maybe it’s just John’s stupid fanboy-admiration for Sherlock’s sheer brilliance. Maybe it’s that John occasionally tells Sherlock to stuff it, to shut up, that he’s an idiot, and maybe he’s the only one who’s ever said that to Sherlock and meant it affectionately. Maybe it’s the fact that he’s just as screwed up as Sherlock is.

Maybe he’s the only one who really knows Sherlock and genuinely _likes_ him anyway.

He has the distinct impression that he’s the only one Sherlock has ever genuinely liked back.

And it’s horrible, and childish, and completely beneath him, but he enjoys being the only one. He relishes it. He’s proud of it.

Sometimes he feels bad for reveling in Sherlock’s loneliness, his friendlessness, the void that is his life.

But sometimes, when Sherlock looks at him like he’s the most interesting person in the world, like he’s the only one worth listening to, the only one worth _worrying_ about, like John _gets_ to him when nobody else does, John feels immensely, incredibly special. 

He doesn’t necessarily like that thought about himself much, but being Sherlock Holmes’ only friend is just about the one thing that makes him extraordinary these days. 

It’s not an emotion he’s proud of, it’s not something he’ll ever say out loud, but he can’t help the little possessive, special thrill that goes through him whenever Sherlock introduces John as his friend.

 

III

It’s three in the morning, and he’s at Harry’s place. Harry is, not to put too fine a point to it, plastered. 

It’s the third time this week she’s called him in the middle of the night, drunk and crying and threatening to throw herself off a building or something equally dramatic if he doesn’t come over _immediately_ to help her.

John knows they’re empty threats. But he goes anyway, because he’s afraid Harry’s going to drink herself to death even more quickly than she’s already doing. 

It’s so bad tonight that he contemplates taking her to a hospital. She’s barely coherent, her eyes don’t focus on him properly anymore, she’s lost any coordination, and the insults she’s hurling at him and the world in general lack their usual razor bite.

But then she starts vomiting, and he knows the worst is past, he can put her to bed now and she’ll sleep.

He sits by her bed and watches her sleep. She’s so out of it that he can check her eyes, like he always does, for the first signs of jaundice. 

He knows it’s only a matter of time. Delirium tremens, or her liver will give out, or she’ll become diabetic and die of hypoglycemia. Even if he wasn’t a doctor, he’d know because he watched it happen to their dad. 

He knows it will only go downhill from here. He’s given up hope that she’ll ever stop drinking. Three times in rehab, a loving, supportive wife and all the therapy money can buy, and they always end up here, John alone at her bedside, making sure she won’t choke on her own vomit. It’s always the same circle. And she’s never, ever, grateful, or sorry. She won’t be sorry, or grateful, or anything other than defiant and bloody-minded until the day she dies of liver failure, in some hospital, possibly mentally so far gone she won’t even recognize John.

And for a split second, John thinks of that day with relief. Because then it will finally be over, and he won’t have to watch her self-destruct anymore. 

He goes into the bathroom and dry-heaves over the washbasin for a few moments, exhaustion, guilt and shame making him shake all over. His leg is heavy tonight, and he has to lean against the wall halfway back to Harry’s bedside.

She’s lying on her side, sleeping peacefully. The room stinks of beer, vodka and vomit. John sinks down on the floor beside her bed, strokes her hair and silently waits for her to wake up and start the whole cycle again. 

 

IV

John loves saving Sherlock’s life. In the big ways, and the small.

That first time was pure instinct, shooting the cabbie before Sherlock could take that pill, John knowing with absolute certainty that Sherlock would take that pill, that he couldn’t not take it, that it was a compulsion, and John stopping this farce the only way he knew how. Of course Sherlock instantly knew, and it changed everything between them, changed the way Sherlock looked at him, made them a team, an ‘us against the world’, a unit.

The second time, when Sherlock shot at Moriarty’s bomb, John pushed Sherlock into the pool, then dragged him out, got his heart to beating again, got the bleeding to stop, hauled him out of a burning building, made sure he went to the hospital for treatment, and slipped painkillers and antibiotics into his tea (which Sherlock drank without protest, even though John was sure he knew exactly what was in it).

It’s not all following Sherlock into dark rooms with cocked guns, even though nothing can beat the rush of knowing he’s responsible for Sherlock’s safety, and nothing can compete with being the only one who can get Sherlock to hold still for long enough to bandage a heavily bleeding leg wound. 

Sometimes it’s making Sherlock eat when he’s about to faint. Sometimes it’s getting him to think twice about something before storming into danger half-cocked. Sometimes it’s flushing cocaine down the loo, or ripping off a fifth nicotine patch, or keeping that tenth cup of coffee out of Sherlock’s reach. 

Addictions are funny things, really. 

Contrary to Holmes’ family opinion, John is, in fact, not an idiot. He’s a doctor; he can diagnose himself, thanks a lot. He knows he’s suffering from a rather serious case of adrenaline addiction, which is the cause of half his problem of readjusting to civilian life. And it doesn’t exactly take the world’s only consulting detective to figure out that if you’ve been shot in the shoulder, a limp might be psychosomatic.  
This is why John has a therapist, after all. Or had, more likely. He hasn’t been back there since… well, since Sherlock. Sometimes he wonders if from now on, his life is always going to be divided in threes. Before the war, and after. Before Sherlock, and after. 

John is self-aware enough to know exactly what’s wrong with him. And it isn’t that he misses the war. Mycroft Holmes, for all his brilliance, is full of shit on this one. Nobody misses wars. He doesn’t miss the killing, and the good people dying around him, he doesn’t miss giving screaming, dying men morphine to make them pass more easily. He’s not that fucked in the head.

Part of what he misses is, and that’s sick enough, the danger. The rush of knowing you’ve survived. The bullets that miss you, the way the heart beats extra strong and hard after the danger has passed, like it wants to prove that it still can. And Sherlock provides plenty of that. Life with Sherlock is never boring, and that’s part of why John stays.

But what he really misses is the all-consuming sense of purpose the war brought him. As a doctor he’s never exactly led a meaningless life, but applying a pressure bandage to a young solider wounded in action while left and right grenades are exploding, knowing that you’re maybe one of maybe ten people in the whole army who can perform emergency medical procedures under heavy fire without their hands shaking, being regarded as a valuable member of an elite team, that’s something you can’t replace easily.

It’s why, when John was told he wasn’t going back, that he’s been released as an invalid, that he’s going home, when he faced the void of a ‘normal’ life, dispensing pills to old ladies, curing flues and coughs, giving shots, he found that when he tried to get out of bed for the first time, his leg wouldn’t hold him anymore, and he fell flat on his face. 

And it held firm and strong again only when he was chasing a killer with Sherlock Holmes through the dark streets of London.

Adrenaline addiction is easy. Bungee jumping works. Hell, piercing works. Dangerous driving, boxing, gambling, it all works. None of that does anything for John. His addiction is a lot more complicated.  
But keeping Sherlock Holmes alive, making sure his heart keeps beating and his body keeps supporting his genius, beautiful, idiot brain, might just turn out to be John Watson’s methadone.

V

The attraction is obvious. The spark, the chemistry, the _something_ between them is glaringly, amusingly for some, obvious.

John knows that it’s equally obvious how besotted he’s been with Sherlock from pretty much Day One. How fascinating, how irritatingly brilliant, how annoyingly interesting he finds Sherlock. 

He hopes it’s slightly less obvious that he’s physically attracted to Sherlock, that he loves touching Sherlock, that he loves watching him move and work and talk and be brilliant, that he loves the thrill of occasionally being able to capture and hold Sherlock’s full and undivided attention. That laser intensity all concentrated on him, it does things to John, physical things.

He knows that nobody suspects that he’s actually in love with Sherlock. They all think he’s infatuated or obsessed or dysfunctionally addicted to Sherlock, and that Sherlock regards John like one would a puppy or a trusted secretary. Cute and useful and somebody to shag, occasionally, nothing more. 

Nobody knows that sometimes, late at night, Sherlock comes to John’s bed, cold and pale and obviously lonely without even being aware of it. He tries to be quiet every time, but John always wakes up, and Sherlock always notices. Sherlock reaches out a hesitant hand, and John pulls, and they touch each other with ever more steady hands, quietly, the only sounds muffled moans against each others’ lips. Afterwards, Sherlock always falls asleep almost in spite of himself, in John’s bed, tips of his fingers brushing John’s side, and John watches him for hours until he falls asleep himself. When he wakes up, Sherlock is always gone.

Nobody knows that Sherlock leans into him sometimes, just to brush their bodies together. Nobody suspects that they kiss, sometimes, randomly, for hours, mostly when something’s exploded, or when there’s nothing on TV. Nobody knows that Sherlock would willingly and readily die, kill, steal, and most importantly, lose, for John. Nobody knows that Sherlock occasionally listens to John, that he respects him, that he sometimes plays the violin for hours when John has nightmares, that he values John’s opinion of him, that John _matters_.

John is the only one who knows that Sherlock loves him. Not even Sherlock knows; John’s pretty sure that he hasn’t yet identified this thing inside him that makes him care about John as love. For once, John is quicker than Sherlock. 

Because John doesn’t only know that Sherlock loves him, he has also discovered something Sherlock doesn’t know and will never, ever believe: John loves Sherlock back.


End file.
